Well traveled: Gloria Fuller shares a piece of her past

At the tender age of 20 way back in December 1952, Gloria Fuller did what a lot of Australians did – she left the country.

It was not from a sense of disappointment in her native land.

“Traveling abroad was just something we were encouraged to do,” she says.

Today, she lives in Randleman with family. Her life has been an interesting one, filled with global travel. Recently, Fuller decided to write her memories for grandchildren and future generations who might like to know “who was the old girl,” as she quaintly puts it. As she reexamined old photos and memorabilia, she came across a manuscript she wrote as a young Aussie in the motherland of England during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a story she shares with Thrive readers in this issue.

As she writes in one of the chapters of the book of her life she is developing, leaving home “was very much a rite of passage by young Australians at that time ‘going home to the old country’ to get a sense of where they had come from, work, backpack through Europe, learn from the culture, view the scenery and get a hands-on education of a totally different way of life and hopefully stay out of trouble. Some did and some didn’t – stay out of trouble, that is.”

Wanderlust was not Fuller’s only motivation. She knew about the upcoming coronation of then Princess Elizabeth on June 2, 1953. Perhaps there was a chance, just a chance, that if she got to London, she might get to see the procession that would occur, she recalls thinking.

Today, Fuller marvels at her temerity, especially in light of world conditions in the modern era. She struck out on a trip from home – granted, in the company of a handful of old and new friends –- a single female in what was then a man’s world, that would take her through some of the less-developed countries on the globe over a six-week period.

Her ship, the Maloja, was a 30-year-old vessel that, in its heyday, was a luxury liner until it was requisitioned for the war effort in 1939. It came back into service in 1945 as a one-class vessel shuttling from London to Sydney, Fuller remembers.

She boarded in Sydney. After brief stops in Melbourne and Adelaide, the ship set course for the Indian Ocean. Her ports of call were deliciously exotic. Fuller had layovers in Colombo in what is now Sri Lanka; Bombay, India, now called Mumbai; Aden in Yemen; the Suez Canal and Port Said in Egypt.

The stop-over in Port Said was at night, but Fuller and a companion took advantage of the brief stay and left the ship to walk around the city.

“When I rethink that day the vision of a 20-year-old, in the company of other 20-year-olds, roaming around Port Said, Egypt, in the dead of night, it gives me pause to wonder whose brains we were using,” she says.

From there, the ship sailed through the Mediterranean Sea to Marseille, around the Rock of Gibraltar and the Bay of Biscay and, finally, docking at Tilbury on the mouth of the Thames River.

“The magic of the voyage was over, Tilbury was dreary, London had dirty fog and we noticed none of it,” she writes in her memoirs.

London was only seven years out of World War II. Rationing was still going on. Debris and destruction were still evident from the relentless bombing the city endured. Still, Fuller says she saw the city in the light of her youth and the thrill of a different culture.

“I almost fainted as we rounded Piccadilly Circus in a London black taxi and saw the statue of Eros and everything having the look of a good 1940s British film. I expected to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh on every corner.”

As fortune would have it, Fuller eventually found a job in London in what was called the Australian House, the equivalent of an embassy in modern times. Processing immigration papers for people headed to her home country also gave her the opportunity to take advantage of one of the few available tickets that would allow her to witness history.

And, that’s where her story begins, in a stadium seat she paid 4 pounds for … “in Green Park, Piccadilly as the announcer from the BBC is saying ‘Good morning everybody, the time is now 6 a.m.’ ”